I want you to think about a time when you felt guilty for your privilege- something you owned, accomplished, etc. Thats what our character Claire experiences. She lives in a penthouse on the Upper East Side and her house is much nicer than any of her female friends’. She feels uncomfortable or guilty about having the best house and neighborhood out of all of them, because it feels show-offy or pretentious. Claire says “Miró, Miró, on the wall, who’s the deadest of them all?”, thinking about her son who passed away. It is a play on words of the Snow White fairy tale in which the Queen in Disney’s version asks “magic mirror, on the wall – who is the fairest one of all?” A word on this line: it was in the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales as “mirror, mirror, on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?” so it is both “Magic Mirror” and “Mirror Mirror.”Miró means Joan Miró, a Spanish, Surrealist artist. The significance of his painting Claire has is that Claire looks at the painting when she is informed about the death of her son at war. The new characters we meet in this portion of the story are Claire, the other mothers such as Jacqueline, Marcia, especially Gloria, Soloman, Joshua, Lara, Blaine, Philippe, Fernando Marcano, computer hackers. An interesting intersection is Gloria herself. She was there in the aftermath of the car accident with Corrigan and Jazzlyn. Gloria went as far as to take care of Jazzlyn’s children. When I first read about Gloria as the mother who lives in the project at the Bronx, I knew she was going to be an important intersection.
